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It’s a go-to tactic of the left: focus all your energy on one target and destroy it. 

It’s about the concentration of force. You pick a powerful target, destroy it, and move on to the next, and the next, and the next. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals frames the strategy.

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RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Make it personal. Make it hurt a particular person. Ideas don’t feel the pain, but a person can get rattled and back off. That is the point of the strategy. 

The left tried this with Trump, and it didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a powerful strategy. It’s just that Trump is sui generis. Nobody is like Trump. 

Today’s target–not that he hasn’t been a target in the past–is Elon Musk. Only the attacks on Elon are really meant for one audience and one audience only: Donald Trump, whose ego they are trying to bruise by attributing the fall of the continuing resolution to Elon’s influence, not Trump’s. 

Elon famously led the charge against the continuing resolution, and the rumors out there are that Trump wasn’t much focused on it until Elon and then Vivek raised a fuss about it. The first is undoubtedly true, although many members of Congress actually got the ball rolling as they read the bill and posted the most outrageous parts of it. 

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The second point–that Trump didn’t care–is more ambiguous. My sense is that he was told that a CR was coming and about one or two provisions, but he never got a full briefing on how this was really a ridiculous omnibus that would emasculate his presidency, and when he found out, he wanted the bill dead. 

Elon and Trump have become best buds, and Elon has been a very effective messenger for Trump over the past few weeks. The Democrats can’t touch Trump right now, but they feel confident they can take Elon down a few pegs and in particular drive a wedge between Elon and Trump. 

Democrats are counting on Trump’s prickly personality and his love of being the center of attention, so they are poking fun at Trump to get him to push Musk away. Musk has the muscle and the money to help Trump immensely–after all, Trump’s strength is setting direction, but no one man can follow through on everything, and Musk is a master at management. 

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Elon is incredibly dangerous to the Democrats because he is even less constrained than Trump, and is almost as good a communicator to the base as the president himself. Working together, Trump and Elon will accomplish great things. Split apart, neither will be as effective. 

It’s hard to say what impact this campaign will have. During Trump’s first term it would have been more likely to work–Trump really does respond to praise and criticism–but Trump seems a lot more focused and even confident of his path than in 2017. 

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The fact that this campaign is so obviously coordinated and aimed at Trump’s soft spot may actually hamper it as well. All these small people, who defended the truly mentally crippled Joe Biden as a strong president, are not exactly great messengers to persuade Trump of anything. 

Democrats clearly believe in the power of the Narrative™, and when people trust the messengers, it can indeed be very powerful indeed. 

But their ability to create a narrative outside their own bubble has been diminishing for a long time and was grievously wounded during the election season. 

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The public doesn’t care about any of this–Musk enjoys the same approval rating as Trump–but it is within the realm of possibility that Trump does. I can’t see into his mind and soul. 

God willing, he laughs at this transparent manipulation. Everybody in Trump’s orbit has a lot of work to do, and Elon’s part in killing the CR was a valuable contribution to our country.